How I Became a Poet

With Comments on my Writing Process

Thirty years ago, more or less, I didn’t like poetry. I was a prose writer. I wrote short stories and aspired to be a novelist, but poetry writing was nowhere on the horizon. At the time, though, I was reading as many books as I could about fiction writing, and I even took a creative writing class the spring semester of my senior year. This is notable because I was a recombinant gene technology major, not an English major. I had the writing bug, but I was trying to be practical—and I was good at biology.

In one of the fiction writing books I was reading, the author was talking about the importance of using as few words as possible. One of the approaches he suggested was writing poetry. After all, with poetry, you have to communicate a complete thought in a small space. While I was thinking about this idea, my professor in my spring semester creative writing class told us an anecdote about Rilke, saying his mother had wanted a girl, so she dressed him as a girl when he was young. This reminded me of an anecdote my mother told me about my great-grandfather. He would tell his grandchildren, “when I was a little girl,” and they would say, “you were never a little girl,” and he would produce a picture of him and his twin sister dressed in dresses when they were infants, because she wanted her twins to look alike.

The anecdote about Rilke got my brain going. The anecdote about my great-grandfather wasn’t enough to write a story, but it was plenty to write a poem. I went home and wrote a free verse poem and turned it in the next class. After the usual classroom critique of the poem in the following class period, the professor said that it was a perfect poem and that he wouldn’t change a thing. He then looked at me and said, “I think, really, you are a poet.”

The Carpenter at Little Pawpaw Lake

"When I was a little girl," my great-
Grandfather said.
We laughed.
When he was young
His mother clothed
Him in dresses,
Lace bonnets,
So he and his sister
Could look alike—
"Else what use is there in having twins?"
Strollers with two girls,
A baby in drag
At the turn of the century.
"When I was a little girl,"
My great-grandfather said.
We laughed.
"You were never
A little girl."
And a tinny yellow
Picture would appear
From a faded jewelry box—
Two toddlers,
Faces framed by frills.

Naturally, I mostly ignored him (though that comment has been with me ever since). I was a fiction writer, and poetry was only going to help me with my prose. So, with the idea I read in the book and the encouragement I had received from my professor, I started writing poetry.

A confession: that wasn’t really my first poem. It was simply the poem that pushed me into writing poetry in a more regular fashion. I probably wrote a few poems before then, and one in particular I am proud of. My microbiology professor said, for the final project in our lab, that we could do anything so long as it had to do with microbiology and was able to demonstrate we understood the concepts. He gave as an example a student who wrote a song. This got me to thinking about writing a poem.

Intestinal Pains

Here I sit with gastroenteritis,
Wondering at the cause as here I lie.
Could it be Lactobacillus,
Bacteroides or E. coli?
Maybe it was something that I ate,
Perhaps some seafood, I don't know.
If that's the case, it could be Aeromonas,
Plesiomonas, or Vibrio.
Of all the choices that I think
It's likely Vibrio; which could it be?
It's likely not vulnificus or cholera
Or I'd be good and dead, you see.
And so for a tiny taste of crab
My stomach's put up quite a fuss,
Not for the meat that I have eaten,
But parahemolyticus.

While this poem used rhyme (the challenge I gave myself was to rhyme with the names of bacteria), the poetry I wrote at the time was mostly free verse. It was all about tightening my prose, so free verse was good enough to do that.

I graduated from Western Kentucky University with my degree in recombinant gene technology and applied for grad schools in molecular biology. I got turned down by every program to which I applied except, of course, WKU, so I stayed there. However, I was writing more and more—more fiction, more poetry. I ended up dropping out of my Master’s program at WKU and taking a year’s worth of English classes in order to have the hours I needed to get into a graduate program in English to focus on creative writing. I took a poetry class, and I was then exposed to many excellent poets. Wallace Stevens in particular inspired me—and he remains a favorite. I also took a poetry writing class, where I really improved my free verse poetry writing.

The only graduate program that accepted me was the one at the University of Southern Mississippi. I was fortunate to be taught fiction writing by Frederick (Rick) Barthelme, who was the most brutal critic I have ever encountered. He was absolutely, arrogantly vicious. His critique of the first short story I turned in resulted in my fellow classmates asking me if I was ok, and I even had someone the following semester express surprise that I had returned. The way I took this brutal criticism, though, was to think, “Oh, I’m with the big boys now. I’m going to have to raise my game.” And I did, in my fiction. To such a degree that Rick, a year later, declared one of my short stories to be “technically perfect.” That wasn’t just him, of course, but the other fiction writing professors and the student critiques in between. But he was the spur.

I also took a poetry writing class, of course, but I wasn’t inspired to do much more than I was already doing. So, I continued writing free verse poetry, and I didn’t really play around with anything else. Certainly not any other forms. A lot of nature poems, but that was simply from my interest in nature.

Realizing that the only thing you can do with a Master’s in English is to get a Ph.D. in it, I applied for Ph.D. programs. One in particular—the program at UT-Dallas—was unusual in being an interdisciplinary program involving aesthetic studies (from which one could choose creative writing, art, music, etc.), literary studies, and the history of ideas (philosophy, mostly). Being inspired by Milan Kundera, I wanted to write philosophical fiction, so this was perfect. I applied, and the head of the creative writing program contacted me via email and asked me to submit three short stories. I did, and he asked me, “What do we need to do to get you here?” I gave him my list of demands—including getting an assistantship—and I got everything I asked for. So, I headed to Richardson, TX to get my Ph.D.

At UTD, I ended up meeting Frederick Turner and taking a poetry writing class with him. Frederick Turner is a formalist, so the poetry he had us write was all formal verse. I knew this going in, so I spent the summer before that class attempting to write sonnets. I wrote a sonnet a day—producing many very terrible sonnets, of course—eventually writing a few decent sonnets by the end of the summer. Rhyming was easy enough, but learning to write in a regular rhythm was quite difficult. Writing in regular rhythms requires getting your brain to create and think in a different way. Rhythm and rhyme force you to make different choices than you would make in free verse. Though good free verse itself can be challenging, as the final word in each line has to be important to the poem’s theme—a requirement I transferred to my choice of rhyming words. I also tended to make unexpected turns in free verse, to keep things interesting.

After Turner’s class, I became a formalist. Almost every poem I have written since then has been in formal verse—rhyming couplets, alternate rhymes, sonnets, ghazals, etc. I enjoy the challenge of it, and I consider bringing contemporary ideas and culture into formal verse to be an interesting problem to solve in my poetry. After all, most poetry written today remains some kind of free verse. Chaos within form creates some interesting works.

My poetry has of course greatly influenced my fiction. Not only has it tightened my prose, but it has found its way into my fiction. I have mixed poetry and prose in my short stories as well as my novels. My one published novel—Hear the Screams of the Butterfly—is full of free verse poetry. I have a novel manuscript I’m working on that is full of formal poetry. I have written plays that have mostly been in verse, including one in rhyming couplets about the House of Odysseus that won a playwriting festival (the audience voted). I’m currently working on another novel that has poetry in it, though part of the structure is also influenced by the structures of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the Bible. My novels have thus started to become more and more influenced not only by poetry, but also by other structures and styles from the past and from other cultures.

Let me finish this by discussing how I now write poetry. I originally started writing poems when I had an idea—this idea could be philosophical or political, or it might come from observing something in nature—but once I started writing in form, I have increasingly been writing through inspiration. Of course, inspiration doesn’t come from nowhere. I have a head full of poetry, ideas, and historical, anthropological, economic, scientific (physics, chemistry, and biology), psychological, linguistic, sociological, and philosophical knowledge from which I draw, and which, when in my unconscious they are integrating themselves, results in sudden insights and inspiration. It’s interesting that this has been much more likely to happen when I became a formalist than when I was a free verse poet. Whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship, though, I cannot say. It was just true for me.

Further, I have found that the idea influences the form. A dialectical idea tends to be written as a Shakespearean sonnet, as I can write it as theme, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. I have had other ideas that wanted to be expressed in ghazals, heroic couplets, and other forms. In most cases, I have written my poems in iambic pentameter. I have written so much iambic pentameter that I can spit them out without thinking about them or counting the beats. It’s important in formal verse to know the forms so well that you don’t even have to think about how to construct them, as that then allows this phenomenon of the idea choosing the form.

All of this came about from how I learned how to write literature. As a storyteller, it’s not uncommon for my poems to be stories. Thus, my prose has influenced my poetry perhaps as much as my poetry has influenced my prose. Further, I tend to mix the forms to create something other than a clearly prose short story or novel. I think that makes those works more complex than they would otherwise be.

This is of course, how my process works, a demonstration of my aesthetic. I hope it can inspire you to experiment with different forms, whether in poetry or prose, or some combination of the two. Perhaps we can even get more verse plays—or epic poems (Frederick Turner’s preferred form). We need to bring the old forms into the present to renew our poetry, plays, and prose. It’s maybe the best way to get us out the stagnation of much recent postmodern literature.